Thinking About The Old Days
by RowenaR
Summary: Ever since Carson died, lazy Sunday afternoons just aren't Laura Cadman's cup of tea anymore. Post Atlantis, Lorne/Cadman if you squint.


**A/N: **Written for **clwilson2006**'s prompt for the Lorne/Cadman promptathon at **major_explosion**. I'd planned to make this short enough so that it would fit into the comment box but they didn't want to cooperate, so I decided to post it (and it's been a while since I posted fic in this journal, most of all Lorne/Cadman). This is more of a het-when-you-squint-story, than full force het but I like what came out of it, so I hope you do, too :)

PS.: The Cultural Support Teams mentioned in the story really exist(ed?). They're all female teams attached to Special Forces units in Afghanistan, doing basically the same that the Female Engagement Teams (i.e. making contact to children and women easier, for example to gather information about suicide attacks etc.) are doing for the regular infantry units, only in a SpecOps capacity. I figured Laura would be a prime candidate for a spot :)

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**Thinking About The Old Days**

_"So I'm lying in bed_  
_Thinking about the old days_  
_Thinking about it all and how it ends sometimes._  
_Was it wrong or right or was I giving up?"_

_Joan Franka, "You and I"_

After Carson died, Laura Cadman could never really get into the Atlantis Sunday spirit again. Even after he came back from the dead, she always managed to either be on duty or find something else work-related to do on the mandatory off days. She tried to get back into the habit when her three year tour ended and they transferred her back to Earth but even here, she kept avoiding typical Sunday activities.

It's only when they deploy her to Afghanistan after a year of stateside duty that she starts to feel at home again. Apparently, avoiding Sundays is a lot easier in a combat zone, even though half of what she's doing there consists of hours and hours of hurry up and wait.

She's part of a Cultural Support Team, technically stationed in Camp Leatherneck and most of the time, she doesn't even know what day of the week it is, anyway. Keeping up with the Force Recon unit she's attached to and staying alive are kind of more at the top of her prioty list.

It's after three months in theatre that she nearly dies in one of those missions your next of kin get your medals, a nicely folded flag and no explanation whatsoever for. The fact that she managed to get into the dust-off chopper without any Force Recon help makes her proud, even when she's sitting on the chopper's floor and the medic tells her she'd be dead now if the bullets hit her four inches more to the right. She's so high on adrenaline that it takes her all until touch down to realize that she knows the chopper pilot's voice.

He says, "Thanks for flying Ancient City Airlines. And remember: sleep tight tonight, your Air Force is awake," and for a moment, she thinks it's the pain medication shot the medic gave her. No way in hell Major Lorne made it to Afghanistan of all fucking places. There's this impulse to get up and wrestle herself into the cockpit, just to check whether she's hallucinating or not but the medic herding her and the rest of the unit out of the chopper into the ER of Heathe N. Craig effectively keeps her from that.

In the end, they all spend an hour in the ER waiting to be treated. None received major injuries but apparently, they're currently really bored here in Bagram and they tell her they want to keep her here for the night, saying that they want to observe the wound for any possible infections. She tries to barter her way out of this, telling them they need to be back at Leatherneck by nightfall but the doctor assigned to her has Keller like qualities and anyway, she hasn't gotten more than three hours sleep in ages and she doesn't even know how long it's been since she slept in a real bed so she nods at the male staff sergeant leading the Force Recon unit and the second in command of her CST and tells them not to get in too much trouble while she's out of commission and makes her way over to the next available bed.

They provide her hospital standard "clothing" and after she had her first shower in two weeks, she nearly curls up on the bed, ready to fall asleep... "So I really did hear that staff sergeant call you Captain Nitro." Jesus, what was in that shot? "Can't believe you actually kept your Atlantis nick name." Seriously, what did that medic give her in that chopper? "I know you're awake, Cadman. Stop ignoring me, _Captain_."

Oh for fuck's sake. "If you don't mind, sir, I'm trying to _sleep_ here." She can hear him snort and because she couldn't ignore Evan fucking Lorne even if her life depended on it, she opens her eyes after all. And there he is, in all his grey-eyed, dimpled, grinning glory, sitting in a chair next to her bed and wearing an impossibly clean flightsuit and apparently, bumped up a pay grade, too. She rolls her eyes. "Don't tell me... someone else is handling your paperwork now and you're bored out of your mind."

She should have added another sir or congratulated him to his new rank or maybe she just should have kept her mouth shut in general but she's never been good at that, particularly not after a mission like that last one. She still refuses to remember anything about it aside from the fact that they all made it alive to Bagram.

Funny enough, he doesn't seem to mind, only shrugs and says, "Nope. Even Lieutenant Colonels still have to write their own flight reports. I'm just exceptionally good at it." She bets he is. He probably had a pre-formulated text for every eventuality he just needs to copy and paste the correct data into ready on his laptop before he received his marching orders so that he can continue being a shining beacon of paperwork correctness, just like in Atlantis. He's that kind of guy.

She resists a sigh. "I'm really tired, sir."

He nods, the grin gone now. "I know." So why doesn't he just let her... "And I can't remember just one time when a mission went down the drain and you just went to bed afterwards."

"Sir..."

"What I do remember is that you were one of those people who needed time to unwind and get a bit of an emotional distance to what happened." He... does? "So I figured I'd see if it's really you. In my experience, unwinding is often easier when there's a friendly face."

She needs a moment to process what he just said. Mainly because it's _true_. She never could go to bed just like that after a mission gone awry. She always needed time to come down, unwind as he said. Usually, she went running or had a go at the punching bag in the workout room but being confined to the hospital tonight, both are out of option. The remaining one... well. "Alright. What do you propose?"

He shrugs again but she can see that underneath a thin veneer of flyboy casualness, he's actually surprised that she takes up his offer. She decides not to think about how she could spot that so easily. "Well," he says in a light drawl - nothing like Sheppard at all but just enough to make her feel a bit of hot and bothered for a moment - "I was thinking about bringing a book to read from but everything I have is currently in the hand of my co-pilot and he's probably the slowest reader I ever met. Other than that... a laptop and a couple DVDs but I had no idea what you might like, so..."

He _says_ it all in a casual way but she's pretty sure the sweat she can see on his forehead has nothing to do with the temperature in the room, most of all because they're already on the onset of Afghan winter and they seem to have a policy about not heating the rooms more than absolutely necessary here. She decides to put him out of his misery. "Have you heard about anyone from the Expedition?"

Operating behind enemy lines most of the time, she's gotten practically no news since the late stages of her deployment preparation training and even though she'd only heard from Katie Brown and a couple of the Marines once or twice a month before that and never minded it, she'd started to miss having news from the life that seems so long ago. So there's real enthusiasm when he finally says, "Actually... yes. Do you remember how Keller started that something with McKay? They broke up two months ago." They did? Huh. "Way I heard it..."

And then he starts going into the rumor mill and she can honestly say that she never thought Evan Lorne might be so well connected but then again, it kind of figures, seeing as for some reason, even the Marines found him badass and approachable enough to pull him into their little circle, and Marines being notorious gossips, just like the Atlantis scientists, he'd probably be one of the best sources of Atlantis gossip ever. And that he shares it with her... well. Let's just say that the sudden warm and fuzzy feeling at that realization is most certainly _not_ a hallucination.

So she listens and asks and offers her opinion and doesn't even hesitate to scoot over so they just about have enough space between them to make it look decent when one of the nurses threatens to throw him out if he doesn't vacate his chair _right this moment_

"You know," he says and grins at her from his side of the bed, "that's really not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon."

No. No, it's not, she thinks and resists the temptation to close the little gap between them and put her head on his shoulder. Later, maybe. When they're not in a very public setting and without the constant danger of worried Force Recon Marines barrelling in. The thought is nice enough that she manages to fully ignore the fact that it's Sunday and that she doesn't even know how to handle a Sunday without having anything to do anymore.

And so this is how Laura Cadman ends up spending her first lazy Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a combat zone, in almost five years with nothing else to do but lounging around in bed and listening to her former superior officer telling her all about the Atlantis gossip that she missed. It really could be worse.


End file.
